If you attend SC11 you will have the opportunity to match wits in a game of Jeopardy!® with IBM's Watson computing system. Watson will be featured in a kiosk located on the 6th floor of the convention and trade center, separate from the main IBM booth. The kiosk is a version of the full IBM Power Systems-based Watson system that competed on the game show. Background on Watson can be found in our coverage of the three day Jeopardy match (day 1, day 2, day 3).

In other interesting news, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that it will deploy and support a world-class supercomputer with comprehensive computing and visualization capabilities for the open science community, which seems standard enough, however, they will be using the Intel Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) processor to help achieve 10 petaflops of performance. The new system, called Stampede, will be built by TACC in partnership with Dell and Intel.

According to the press release: When completed, Stampede will comprise several thousand Dell "Zeus" servers with each server having dual 8-core processors from the forthcoming Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family (formerly codenamed "Sandy Bridge-EP") and each server with 32 gigabytes of memory. This production system will offer almost 2 petaflops of peak performance, which is double the current top system in XD, and the real performance of scientific applications will see an even greater performance boost due to the newer processor and interconnect technologies. The cluster will also include a new innovative capability: Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processors codenamed "Knights Corner," providing an additional 8 petaflops of performance. Intel MIC co-processors are designed to process highly parallel workloads and provide the benefits of using the most popular x86 instruction set.

Expect to here more about Intel MIC as SC11 gets closer.

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